Business

Most of the posts up to this point have focused on getting adjusted and me expressing whatever it is I am feeling at any point. But there is actually a serious business side to my peace corps experience and living here in Burkina. (Its not all waterfalls safaris and elephants)

As a Health Volunteer in Burkina I will be working on a number of health issues here in Burkina. These include hygiene, malnutrition, malaria, family planning, maternal health, and diarrhea.  Real interesting stuff. Most of my time will be spent at local medical center (CSPS) where I will work with a nurse and mid-wife. Doctors are rare in Burkina and usually hold a more administrative position and rarely see patients.  The nurses are government employees and are assigned to work at a CSPS. More often than not, the nurse does not speak the local language and only speaks French. French is the language of the educated and is not widely spoken by the majority of the population. (Primary and secondary schools are taught entirely in French, but only 2% of students finish school while 1% go on to university).  One of my jobs as a health agent will be to learn the local language and culture and to then effectively reach out to the local population on issues surrounding health education and empowerment.

The CSPS is pretty basic with what they can and/or cannot do. They can serve as a basic pharmacy, they can treat simple malaria, they can treat diarrhea, they can give vaccinations, and they do support the needs of pregnant women.  If one needs any invasive surgery or has a severe medical condition, they must provide their own transportation to the district or regional hospital which can be pretty far away.  As long as nothing serious happens, the CSPS can take care of the local village(s). One CSPS can serve anywhere from 1 to 15 different villages. As one can imagine, it gets busy! Especially when there is only one or two nurses.  A CSPS is supposed to have 3 staff members. One of which is a midwife.

Drugs here are vastly subsidized and the government picks up the majority of the tab. Methods of birth control cost at most $3.00 USD for a 6 month supply.  INSANITY! It cost about the same to deliver a baby at the CSPS. $3.00 USD translates to about 1500 cfa. To put that in perspective; a bowl of beans (“benga“ DELICIOUS) cost 50- 100 cfa, and a text message cost 10cfa (international is 50cfa).  Life here is pretty cheap. It’s a good thing I make $3.00 a day right now while in training (a beer is 700cfa).  On the same note, life and drugs here are cheap for a reason.  The people are poor.  Mostly farmers, rarely anyone makes a profit off of their crops and even fewer people save their money.  $3.00 USD is a lot of money here. 

Weak rains during the rainy season decimated the agriculture here and there is widespread fear of a famine or food shortage within the coming year when food runs out in March/April. Instances of child mal-nutrition are definitely going to rise and we have been told to be prepared to deal with the upcoming food shortage. Tough times ahead for the people of Burkina Faso. 

Tougher still, the food shortage will be followed by malaria season, June/July. Adults and children who’s immune systems are already weak from lack of nutrition will be especially susceptible to falling ill with Malaria. This coming year will be a busy year for those of us working with Health related issues. I’m excited for my work and challenge but feel increasingly sad about the reality and seriousness of the situation.

On a different note:

Women and men do not usually mix or associate here unless they are university educated and more liberal minded. Women do not drink with men and you would be hard pressed to find a woman at a bar or dancing. There is no PDA and men and women pretty much live in two very different realms. It’s interesting but as PCTs, most of us go out and enjoy spending time together.

Okay, that’s all for now.  In my next update, I will try to focus on things that I have been doing but I wanted to give a lot more background info in this message. Its taken so long to get solid information to you because I wanted to be sure that I was knowledgeable about what I was speaking on. I would not want to get any false info out into the WWW. 

That being said, I hope that some of this was interesting, or maybe even useful to some of you at home. 

Best wishes